i will be in town starting on jan 31st. i have a home on the island and had a cell phone but the house was broken into a few months back and i think the phone will be gone. do i have to buy a new phone or is there somewhere i can get a temp phone while on the island?

is there a place to rent on the island? i think i want to get to the house and see if its there before i fork it over, lol. also, if i bring my phone, can i switch sim cards and have it work? i have an i phone, i wonder if that would work.

hey thanks for the info guys. dabunk, let me know if you find anything further on the i phone working in ac. i am bringing it irregardless as its my i pod too.

tacogirl, i think i have some old cell phones laying around my shop, im going to go see what i can find. if i do find a few how hard is it to get the chips put in them? i heard some prices here but i think its kind of high huh? if im bringing the phone.

also, i see you here a lot and since we are directly talking i thought youd be the one to ask. anything special going on during the first week of feb? we will be in ac in about 9 days. arrive on the 31st. what kind of activities are going on? looking to talk to some expats about taking the plunge. also am going to have a pair of teens with me, anyone have teens on the island. i want to try to get these guys having fun this time, we live a ways outside of town to the south and last time they got bored a bit.

I think you'll find an iPhone won't work - they've put restrictive software into it to tie it to one provider. Most other phones should work fine with a BTL Digicell sim card. I'd recommend doing it that way as you'll then have a constant phone number whenever you visit.

Remember that BTL don't interpret money credits to a pre-paid phone the same way that most other companies do. Here a credit is valid for a specified period, typically three months for larger credits, and on the date any money you haven't used is confiscated, however much it might be. The more the better from their point of view.

In the UK and so far as I know the US that isn't the practice. There the balance of your credit is good for a specified time after your last use of the phone. "Use" means making a call, sending a message, or crediting more funds. In the UK you don't pay to receive a call (by law) and I'm not sure whether receiving a call counts as "use". I imagine that in the US, where you pay to receive calls as well as to make them (extraordinary business practice, a spam caller's charter) receiving a call would count as "use".

After a lengthy period of non-use, I believe substantially longer than the time referred to above, your number will lapse and you sim card will become a piece of useless plastic. I don't know how long that takes.

A cell phone needs to be Unlocked before a btl sim can work in it. Usually any phone that is tied to a carrier cannot be unlocked. So if your phone says Sprint, Verizon, etc on it, you will not be able to change out SIM cards.

It is very possible your i phone will work here without changing SIMs (depending on your service provider). The problem will be the charges.

With T-Mobile you can call customer service to have your phone unlocked. They email you the "unlock" code. It sometimes takes several days to receive, but in my recent experience it only took 24 hours.